The inhuman character of human rights

A Synopsis of the homonymous book of Prof. Christos Yannaras

The word rights means the claim or requirement that results from any kind of written or common Law. There is no such thing as rights that does not spring from a system of Law. Thats why whoever has rights, keeps power: It is the power (provided by Law) of an individual or a group of individuals who demand for a public or a private interest to be satisfied. The enactment of this power is a claim mandatory upon all. The same terms of claim-requirement-power of interest signify that the rights refer to private or collective f o r t i f i c a t i o n s ( s a f e g u a r d i n g ) . The self-existent, self-interest unit (that is an individual or a group of individuals) fortifies their claims through the Law. And, on the other side, its the same Law that restricts their innumerable claims and defines their obligations. In any case, rights and obligations, fortification and restriction of interest, aim to bring a balance in peoples relationships, but following an i n d i v i d u a l i s t i c logic. The logic of the rights of Law, although refers to relationships, is not the logic of relation communion of needs; But it is the logic of the self-centering priority of interest. The rights provide an equalizing and unclassified power of interest to undifferentiated units. A wealthy man and a broke man have in principle the same financial liberties or rights. An analphabet citizen and an owner of a media company have the same legal right of the freedom of expression, no matter how differently weights the power of their word. The anthropologic basis for the logic of rights is the person before the law, which means the abstract vehicle of rights that has nothing to do with the actual human existence. The existential o t h e r n e s s of every human being the unique, distinct and unrepeatable mode of every single existence is refuted (discredited) by the logic of the rights enactment.

This refutation of the existential otherness of persons is enacted through a convention: The Law as the source of rights in modernity is a social contract (a form of pactum subjectionis1). The communion of persons is interpreted as a corporate association of individuals (societs) who, step down their existential otherness in favour of the total; accept equation of their interests as well as equation of the hierarchy of their interests; and agree that they all have an equalizing enactment of their private claims. In that way, through this institutional equation, the term communion has declined to an arithmetic sum total, an abstract interpretation of a total of undifferentiated units2. The abstract person before the law defines the criterion and aim of society: the equation functions as a reassurance and self-confirmation for the individual. The logic of the social contract is by default utilitarian; it excludes any ontological (existential) interpretation of the social event. It skates over the indefinable dynamic of the communal relations of persons and reduces to a phenomenology (a visible reality): It attributes persons with objective roles they have to play in the frame of a structural co-habitation. The roles are those of the civilian, the citizen and the member of society. The same roles are those who define the fortification of the respective rights: the civil rights, the political rights and the social rights3.
1 See also: JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass (Harvard U.P.) 1971, p. 11-22, 118-192. I use the word communion as a translation of the Greek word kinonia. The official translation of the word kinonia is the English word society. But, actually, society has nothing to do with kinonia. Kinonia means an indefinable dynamic of relations that give priority to the otherness of existence; means the unity that results from an organic coexistense; have as a basis the sharing of persons needs, and a loving bond. In ancient Greek world its the organic participation in the common struggle of citys life. Later, the word kinonia is used to express the love among the Persons of the Holy Trinity; also to signal the communion of love between spouses. It has nothing to do with the interest and the utilitarian relationships that characterize a society.
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And here we have to make another clarification in order to signal the difference between the word person-persona and the Greek word (prosopo). The word persona in ancient Rome used to signal the theatrical role, and it probably came from the Greek word that is the mask the actors used to wear in ancient tragedies. Later, the Roman persona started to be used among the Jurists to signify the role someone plays in his social or legal affairs, and again has nothing to do with the real existence but it is an application of the existence. The word prosopo in Byzantine era turned out to signal the free existence and the ontological mode of existence. The same being is identified with the prosopo (person) and not with the essence. There is no essence without the person. And there is no person without essence. But the ontological reason or the source of the being is the person that is free from the necessity of essence. (For a deeper analysis, see JOHN ZIZIOULAS, Being

The fortification of individuals rights appeared to be the beginning -and the pursuit- of the political life. In fact, it is a pre-political achievement (it goes before politics), because it distorts the initial definition of politics. It does not aim in principle to the city (polis) neither to the formation of communal relations; but it aims to the fortification of individual autonomy and to the collective co-habitation as a numeral co-existence of undifferentiated units, who have secured the conditions of their self-dependence and selfmanagement of their interests. The secureness is accomplished by the gathering of individual rights from common mutual Law which is enacted by the central government. But then, this is about the administrative balancing of interests it is not politics. The same logic of individual rights presupposes anything collective, as opponent to what is private: the society and the State power (the government) is a threat for the individual. In the collective co-habitation the individual is threatened by the savageness of power of those who are powerful and also the arbitrarity of the governors. The fortification of rights by the Law is an important defense against such threatening. We should not forget that the enactment of the individual rights determines the boundaries of the European modernity: it marks the end of the dark ages experience, ages of torture and insecurity for the western people. The notion of right has been known in the West since the dark ages, however then, the rights concerned specific individuals or specific social classes. The radical innovation of Modernity lies in the fact that Modernity made rights "human", i.e. common to all humans, without discriminations. However, the political society, the communion of citizens, does not start with the modern individualization of man. In reverse, the individualization might be a progress with regard to the dark ages, but it introduces a tragic retrocession beside the historical fact of ancient Greek politics and the priority of person (prosopo) of the so called Byzantine anthropology. Lets see why.

as Communion, N.Y.-SVS Press, 1985. Also, CHRISTOS YANNARAS, Person and Eros, Brookline Mass. H.C. Orth. Press, 2006)

The concept and requirement of individual rights is absent from the ancient Greek world as well as from the Roman and Byzantine tradition. However, it does not mean that Greeks and Romans used to consider the Emperors arbitrarity in the use of power, or the violation of the citizens freedom, credit or dignity as acceptable. But, there was a totally different logic: it was a political logic. In ancient democracy of Athens, at least, who defined the concept of the terms polis-politia-politiki (city-city state-politics), they used to conceive freedom, credit or dignity of person not as a requirement of individuals fortification, neither as a way of defense against the State power; they used to understand them as an organic result of the participation of citizen to the common achievement of the relations of community. The ancient Greek polis (city) and the politics founded on an ontological (existential) request: it was the pursuit of the truth of life, that is the life to be according to the truth; and truth for the ancient Greeks is the imitationfulfillment of the logical harmony and order that constitute the universe to cosmos (that in Greek means ornament). The Greeks developed their first settlements into polis (cities) from the time that their common utilities the servicing of the utilitarian needs of co-habitation gave way to the priority of excersizing the truth; and this cannot be an individual effort or aim; it is by definition a social event, a common exercise. The truth for the ancient Greek world was very different from that of the demand for objectivity. From Heraclitus to the neo-Platonists, knowledge of truth was verified as an event of communion: everything that we share, we know to be true; what we have that is peculiar to us, we know to be false4. Knowledge is proved true, only when it is verified by common experience only when by its announcement we share with others, understand and are understood, are in tune with the common experiential certitude5.
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Heraclitus, Frag. Diels-Kranz I, p.148, 29-30. The community that secures the truth is not the one where the individual is adjusted or subordinated to the word and opinion of majority. But the notion of community has to do with the event of participation that constitutes the logicality (rationality) of persons. We become logical so far as we participate in common logic, and not because we are naturally gifted with our own intellectual capability.

Then, Law and Justice define the conditions of the individuals participation to the common request for the life to be true, that is to be according to the logical harmony and decency6. One can therefore understand that the safeguarding of "individual rights" was entirely useless in the ancient Greek world - the whole idea was incompatible with the Greek version of politics. The honor of being a citizen provided much more privileges than those conventionally provided (through the civil code) by the protection of individual rights7. The civil code (political laws) just put the boundaries and coordinates the communal struggle of citizens to achieve the aim of truth and eudemonism. [The determinant between politics and individualization is this: politics have an ontological content, and it aims to communal relations that constitute the real good, the real existence and life; while, individualization perpetuates the primary, instinctive turn (recourse) to self-confirmationself-profitselfutility. Politics always presupposes an interpretation of the vehicle of needs of the individual human existence and collective coexistence and this is a clearly ontological consideration, a positive or a negative answer to the metaphysical question. As long as politics express communal requests, it presupposes a concept for life and co-existence that is a practical confrontation with metaphysics. The problems of politics have also an ontological basis and in reverse, the problems of ontology are problems of politics too.]

The Aristotles adherence on justice as the logicality of communal relations; on logicality as analogy and proportion; on analogy and proportion as truth; on truth as virtue; on virtue as eudemonism; on eudemonism as existential perfection and wholeness, build up a concrete notion of Justice, favour to its ontological realism.

In Modernity, "individual rights" protect an individual from the arbitrary exercise of Power. But in Ancient Greece, the Power meant all citizens together (the demos) -the "State" (power) belonged to the demos (democracy). Every citizen "has reason and power": from the moment that he is a citizen, he or she is by definition capable of holding any political office (this is why citizens were selected randomly and not elected). Because a political function is "sacred" (it serves the truth), a citizen's body is sacred too. In Ancient Greece, any bodily punishment of harm was unthinkable for a citizen (whipping, hitting, etc.); it was unthinkable to insult a citizen's body. It was also unthinkable to have an executioner: Socrates, who preferred death to exile, drank hemlock by himself -there was no executioner to kill him.

The ontological basis of politics is much clearly clarified by the Christian experience. In Christian perspective the real existence that constitutes the measurement of the true life, is not an impersonal cosmic necessity or the uncaused logic of harmony and decency of relations. The real existence and causal origin of being for the Christian experience is God as a personal existence (hypostasis). God is not in principle a given Essence, which exists in consequence as a Person. Rather he is in principle a Person, who being absolutely free from every necessity and every predetermination hypostasizes (makes into hypostases-persons) his Being, his Essence, giving birth eternally to the Son and sending forth the Holy Spirit. God is not obliged by his Essence to be God; he is not subject to the necessity of his existence. He exists, since he loves and love is only an event of freedom. Free and out of love, the Father hypostasizes his Being in a Triad of Persons, constitutes the principle and mode of his Existence as a community of personal freedom and love. Holy Scripture assures us that God is love. It does not tell us that God has love, that love is an attribute, a property of God. It assures us that God is is love, that God is as love, that the mode by which God is is love. God is a Trinity of Persons and this Trinity is a Monad (unit) of life, because the life of the Person of God is not a simple survival but an unbroken union of love. Each Person exists not for himself but he exists offering himself in a community of love with the other Persons. Their Existence is drawn from the actualization of life as communion, from life which is identified with self-offering love8. If, then, God is the true existence and life, the cause and source and starting point of being, then in every case being, existence and life is inseparable from the dynamic of love. Since the mode by which God is is love, and from this mode springs each possibility and expression of life, then life must function as love in order to be actualized. If it does not function as love, then existence does not constitute life.

Think yourself to be in love, but really in love. To live unselfishly in order to receive the selfoffering of the Other. Not existing and then loving as an afterthought, but existing because you love, and in the degree in which you love. (CHRISTOS YANNARAS, Variations on the Song of Songs, transl. by Norman Russel, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Massachusetts 2005).

This same mode of existence of God is also obtainable for man, as an optional possibility, just because God assumes human nature and makes it a participant of his own divine Nature; And he does so in the second Person of the Holy Trinity, the only Son of the Father become flesh: Jesus, the Christ of God. In the historical person of Christ is confirmed the freedom of Uncreated to be in the mode of created, but also the possibility of created to exist in the mode of freedom of Uncreated. It is a mode of existence that has been historically incarnated in the event of Ecclesia (Church)9. Then, perfection for man is the actualization of the mode of Divine existence and life which is nothing but love; it has nothing to do with the human equitable justice and justification. The same notion of Gods justice, either in the Old or the New Testament is founded on His mercy10, on the faithfulness of Gods love to His creation. And the Christian notion of justice is formed according to this exemplar: It is not a conformation to some commands that fix up behaviours and balance the utilitarian relations. Justice is the faithfulness of man to the grace of God, a self-abandonment to the gift of divine eros (love) for man. God is just because He is faithful to what He is: He is love and he calls man to the fulfillment of a personal communion with Him. Only the response of man to the invitation of Gods love judges him: either he

9 Similar to the ancient Greek "assembly of the people", Greek citizens did not assemble
primarily to discuss, judge and take decisions, but mainly to constitute, concretize and reveal the city (the way of life "according to the truth") ; in the same way, Christians would not assemble primarily to pray, worship, and be catechized but mainly to constitute, concretize and reveal, in the Eucharistic dinner, the way of life "according to the truth", incorruptibility and immortality: not the imitation of the secular "logic", but of the Trinitarian Society of Persons, the society which constitutes the true existence and life, because "He is Life" (1.John 4.16). The Church does not call us to hold out some theoretical theses which must be accepted in principle. She invites us to a personal relationship, to a mode of life which constitutes a relationship with God or leads progressively and experientially to a relationship with im. In this way our entire life is transformed from individual survival to an event of communion. 10 Mercy is opposed to justice. Justice is the equality in the even scale, for it gives to each as he deserves; and when it makes recompense, it does not incline to one side or show respect of persons. Mercy, on the other hand, is a sorrow and pity stirred up by goodness, and it compassionately inclines a man inb the direction of all; it does not requite a man who is deserving of evil, and to him who is deserving of good it gives a double portion. If, therefore, it is evident that mercy belongs to the potrion of rightousness, then justice belongs to the potrion of wigkedness. As grass and fire cannot coexist in one place, so justice and mercy cannot abide in one soul. ST.ISAAC THE SYRIAN (5th century), Homily NH.

becomes participant to what constitutes his salvation-existential wholeness or he fails to fulfill life and this is the notion of sin (existential failure).

The Christian justice stands in the very opposite of the claims for fortification of the individual. Participants to the ecclesiastical event, even robbers, publicans, prostitutes, or sinners, do not need to establish individual rights. Being a participant and a member of the body of Church means that one only exists in order to love and be loved therefore, far from any expectation of self-protection through a legislation which would be "mandatory for all". Those who are first, according to the conventional estimations, bear out to be last and the last become first (Mark 10, 31, Luck. 13, 20). Criterion of justification of man for the Christian experience is not the individual achievements of consistency to ethics; it is not the virtues which fortify the individual into an illusion of self-sufficiency (autarky). The existence is justified only as an event of community and relation, as freedom from any predetermination of necessity, attrition and death that is, as love11. In the Christian perspective, the Law matters only as a way to deter the evil: It provides the necessary delimination (i.e. protection) of relations in order not to be alienated or damaged; law delimitates the self-centered/egocentric existence from producing selfishness, utilization of the Other, oppression, tyranny. Not because these are objectively unfair and unjust deeds, but first because they work as factors that alter the relations nature and conditions: they convert them to conditions of subordination and dependency. Law directs but not valuates, neither punishes: Its just the indicator of the way for the achievement of relation as self-transcendance.

And here by relation we mean the achievement of freedom from the egocentric self-defense; a continual struggle for self-denial. The strength of the Church is made perfect in weakness mainly because only with the recognition of human inadequacy can we transpose the possibility of life into the love of God which raises the dead. Isolation in self-sufficiency, satisfaction in our virtue, our efficiency, results, sound judgment, do not leave room for the skip of self-denial and self-transcendence which free the life-giving possibility of love. (CHRISTOS YANNARAS, Elements of Faith, transl. by Keith Schram, T&T Clark Edinbugh 1991).

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The new concept of politics in modernity is the substitution of the aim of truth by the aim of utility. Politics release from ontology and gather its Law and principles from the Enlightments philosophy, which is characterized by a polemical rejection of what European people knew as metaphysics from their dark ages past12. In the place of metaphysics we have an ultimate priority of human nature13: the logic of the nature; the intellectual capability (facultas rationis) that the humans naturally have; the Law that results from the consideration of human being as primarily a natural (biological) existence; the natural pleasure and happiness that a man can accomplish in the limited time of his life. This natural logic of modernity is briefed, in acto, in the ultimate priority of individuals rights that summarizes the system of Political Liberalism: Political Liberalism expresses the priority of fortification and activation of individuals freedom. The freedom for this political system is understood as a right: the right of the individuals innumerable liberties. The citizen may decide on his ideas, his political party, his favourite newspaper, the means of

12 People in the West actually rejected that form of metaphysics that had transformed to an ideology and drove to some kind of theocracy. However, the various forms of "theocracy" have no relation at all to the ancient Greek politics as an "exercise of truth", nor with the ecclesiastical realization of the image of the Trinitarian Communion. Theocracy is the use of metaphysics (as a supreme authority) in order to impose normative principles of behavior or aims of power by force upon the collectivity. But any use of metaphysics for secular aims transforms metaphysics into ideology, into a psychological illusions. In the cases of ancient Greek democracy and of the (Eastern) Christian Church, the social event cannot become subject to ideological rules or aims, as its dynamic realization is an aim in itself. Relations that realize the communion of life are in both cases the unique objective of collectiveness, as they constitute the way of "that which truly exists" (even if this way refers to two different models). Metaphysics are subject to ideology when they evacuate their ontological content (i.e. the question about existence, about the cause and purpose of being). Metaphysics without ontology serve individual psychology (the priority of individual feelings, sentimental "certainties", "convictions" which protect the ego). And metaphysics borrow these psychological "certainties" and "convictions" from ideologies.

13 The denial of Metaphysics encouraged the absolute affirmation of Nature (Physics). The idea was that normative principles and rules of Justice should not be deduced out of the hypothetical "Law of God", which was arbitrarily handled by religious institutions, but by the logic of the laws of nature which was objective and controllable. However, the Enlightment seemed to ignore the fact that a natural human collectiveness may extend from extreme unselfishness to the most brutal self-centernessq; from the co-suffering love and eros to sadism, violence, blind lust for power.

his financial and business activity, the unions or clubs he is interested in or protect his interests14. Maybe the most representative picture of political liberalism could be a contemporary shopping mall. The client there may choose among a huge diversity of things, he is totally free and easy and also self-serviced; he is alone and responsible only for his own choices and preferences, sealed in his isolation, but he tastes the pleasure of satisfying his desires. He is an impersonal consumer, unconcerned for the social event, without the responsibilities and risks of the immediacy of relations of community15; he possibly seeks to overcome the impersonal neutralization and the irresponsibility of his uncritical impulses by making some peculiar or distinctive choices. But, alas, the managers responsible for the operation of the shopping mall already know this yearning and negate it through the psychological strategy of the advertisement spots. The operation system of a shopping mall, as well as the institutions of the Political Liberalism give us a representative picture of what freedom is, as a right of individuals innumerable options. The citizen has an impressive option of freedoms, but also a very limited capability and responsibility to actualize communal relationships. Then we have the constitution of a perfectly organized coexistence of unsocial individuals. The responsibility of citizen is reduced to the passive right of political vote, but this is also sabotaged by the usage of marketing and advertisement in politics. Even the artistic creation, the scientific research, the religious faith, is understood under the perspective of rights: as the right of expression, the right of knowledge, the right of religious liberty. There is no concern for the man as an existential being: the interpretation, concept and aims of his existential uniqueness, the authenticity
14 We might say, for example, that someone has a right to liberty if it is in his interest to have liberty, that is, if he either wants it or if it would be good for him to have it. In this sense, I would be prepared to concede that citizens have a right to liberty. But in this sense I would also have to concede that they have a right, at least, generally, to vanilla ice cream. (R.Dworkin, Taking Rights seriously, Cambridge, Mass (Harvard U.P.) 1977, 4.4: Institutional Rights, p. 268). 15 Liberalisms psychology posits a world of autonomous individuals, each guided by his or her idiosyncratic values and goals, none of which can be adjudged more or less legitimate than those held by others. In such a world, people exist as isolated islands of individuality who choose to enter into relations can metaphorically be characterized as foreign affairs. (MARK TUSHNET, Following the Rules Laid Down: A Critique of Interpretivism and Neutral Principles, 96 Harvard Law Review, 1983, p. 781).

or alienation of his existence before the phenomenology of his behaviour and beyond any legal claim of individual rights. If the concept of freedom is not exhausted in the right of individuals choice, if freedom is primarily the nonalienation of person, the possibility to be he himself without subordination to necessities that negate his existential otherness, then the system of political liberalism is not adequate for the ensuring of human freedom. By the end of the 20th century a massive bibliography proclaims and denounces the historical end of the modernity achievements: the end or bankruptcy of politics, the end of trust to the social contract, the end of civil state, the end of ideologies16. The detection of the historical end is based on the empiric conviction that these natives of modernity do no function any more, have failed as principles, methods and ways of hierarchy of needs. It is also demonstrated and analyzed the most dangerous consequence of the alienation of politics in the modernity paradigm: an anthropologic corruption, a gradual slip towards a new type of human temper and psychism with primary disabilities to communicate and refer to others17, that is a disability of logical composition18. However none of this analysis ever reached the basis of the problem, the questioning of the basic logic which is the ultimate priority of individuals rights. It is obvious that we cannot go back and just imitate a cultural paradigm of the past. Neither we can ignore today the triumph of individuals rights and liberties. But we have to be brave enough to face the dead ends of the
Suggestively only: PIERRE BIRNBAUM, La Fin du politique, Paris (Seuil) 1975. MAURICE DUVERGER, La dmocratie sans le peuple, Paris (Seuil) 1967. JOSEPH BARTHELEMY, La crise de la dmocratie reprsentative, RDP, 1928. CHARLES DORAN, Systems in crisis : new imperatives of high politics, N.Y. (Cambridge Univ. Press) 1991 ALEXANDRAS SHTROMAS (editor), End of isms? Reflections on the fate of ideological politics after Communisms collapse, Oxford (Blackwell) 1994. 17 It is worth reading the fiction of MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, Les particules elementaires, Flammarion 1998, for an understanding of this degeneration of psychism of the man of modernity. 18 The drive towards life passes through the Other. The presence of the Other the potentiality of relation, that is, of life is the space in which the first signifier, the word of desire, is manifested. The word which constitutes the subject, the bearer of desire. The appearance of the signifier, which is the presupposition and starting-point of the relation, gives birth to the subject. The subject is born when the signifier appears in the field of the Other (Lacan) the power of responding to the desire... What we call a subject is an erotic fact, and because it is an erotic fact it is also a (logical) rational existent. (C. YANNARAS, Variation on the Song of Songs, H.C. Press, Massachusetts, 2005).
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utilitarian realism of politics in modernity and post-modern era. Especially when it is obvious that the positive triumphs are undermined by their same keystone and foundation: the fortification of priority of individuals autonomy. Any common interpretation of existence and life, of world and History, of love and death (any ontological concept of the daily life of people, i.e. the question about the cause and purpose of being) is imprinted on the comprehension of social event, on the articulation and operation of institutions, on the composition of Law. We have one model of society and Law system when we accept man as a biological unit of an undifferentiated total and a radically different one when we give priority to the existential otherness of every single human being. Such variations actually constitute the diversity of civilizations (paradigms) in the human History.
[Translated and edited by Anastasia Byrou]